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An article published last month in Nature asserts that married female scientists do more than twice the amount of housework than male scientists.This is to be expected given some of the showings in the family law literature. Unique, however, is the authors’ proposed solution that universities provide household help to their faculty.For the record, I will pack my bags for the first employer—all other things being equal—offering to hire me a housekeeper.Human Resources and Recruiting Departments across the country take note:

From Nature:

Female US scientists do nearly twice as much housework as their male counterparts, according to a study in Academe, the online publication of the American Association of University Professors. Science historian Londa Schiebinger of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and analyst Shannon K. Gilmartin found that partnered women scientists at 13 top US institutions do some 54% of household tasks, requiring more than 10 hours a week on top of the 60 hours they work. Partnered male scientists, however, do just 28%. The remainder is done by hired help. The authors propose that university benefits could be made more flexible to include support for housework help.

P.S. Consistent with the theme of this post, this article is an entertaining one, about a working married woman keeping track of her minutes and hours (but not in the billable sense) in order to find the 30 leisure hours that a sociologist suggests married working women have per week.